Sunday, July 08, 2012

The Gospel of Jesus is the Gospel of Inclusion, of women, of Samaritans, of lepers, of thieves, of all those whom male Jews, themselves oppressed and exploited by the Roman Empire, hated and feared. Christ's dream is for right-brain peace, Julian of Norwich's and Bob Marley's 'One Love'.

In America Thoreau and in Russia Tolstoy wrote on Civil Disobedience and Non Violence against war, against injustice.

My father, Glorney Bolton, was a journalist for the Times of India in the 1930s. India had been conquered first by the East India Trade Company, then by England, and laws were enacted to the benefit of the powerful, against the Indian people who had lost their sovereignty. Mahatma Gandhi, who revered Tolstoy, used non-violence, enacting to the oppressor a theatre, a mirror, of the oppressor's injustice. Salt was monopolized as in the Roman Empire so also in the copycat British Empire. Gandhi chose to walk to the sea at Dandi, to boil sea water and to illegally produce salt as an act of freedom - for which the police attacked and beat the participants who turned the other cheek and went peacefully to prison. My father was present at that act of freedom - speaking of witnessing Gandhi's simple act of walking to Dandi and boiling sea water as history quietly being made.

In America cheap labour was provided by slaves brought from Africa, slaves who were forbidden to know how to read or write, who could be bought and sold at will, their families separated, husbands from wives, children from parents. Even after slavery ended African Americans could be lynched, murdered, their bodies mutilated, by the Ku Klux Klan. I remember benches and drinking fountains in parks in the American South with Pharisaical labels saying 'Whites Only'.

One day a part Black, part Cherokee, part Irish lady, Rosa Parks, sat, not in the back row of seats in a Montgomery, Alabama, bus but too near the front where only Whites would sit. She refused to comply with the unjust rules and laws. Rev. Martin Luther King organized, in Gandhi's manner, a boycott of all the Montgomery buses. The city ground to a halt. Eventually, after many Freedom marches with Black and White participants, some of whom were lynched, King was able to speak in Washington D.C. in front of the Lincoln Memorial, his splendid speech, 'I have a dream'.

The Roma in Romania were slaves of the nobles and monasteries from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth-century when Uncle Tom's Cabin was translated into Romanian, longer than were Africans in America. Roma have still not achieved Civil Rights. When I first went to America I heard Whites say of Blacks that they could not be trusted, that they are criminals, of sub-normal intelligence. Today, I still hear such comments said of Roma by Italians and by Romanians, that Roma steal, that they steal babies, that they are dirty, that they don't work. My experience of Roma is that the police steal from them their money they need to send to their children looked after by the grandparents in Romania, who are starving, that the police steal their blankets from them in the coldest nights of the year after forcing them to sleep in the open from having bulldozed their shacks with all their belongings, including medicines and documents, that we steal their babies for being adopted into rich Italian families, that Roma are scrupulously clean though allowed no access to water, and that they work extremely well, preserving ancestral skills as blacksmiths, stonemasons, carpenters, gardeners, etc. It is true a Roma camp is surrounded by rubbish, but inside their living space everything is clean, shoes taken off, carpets washed, this because anything spiritually or physically polluting is thrown away from the living space. There is no official rubbish removal given to them. This, I learned from the town government in question, because when I telephoned I was told: 'They do not work, they do not pay taxes, we won't remove their rubbish'. Consequently rats gnaw babies' feet in Florence. But our laws in Italy do not allow Roma to work. Nor can they find work in Romania. For which they must have the diploma and a house. How to break this cycle?

The Gospel of Jesus is the Gospel of Inclusion, of women, of Samaritans, of lepers, of thieves, of all those whom male Jews, themselves oppressed and exploited by the Roman Empire, hated and feared. Christ's dream is for right-brain peace, Julian of Norwich's and Bob Marley's 'One Love'.